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Most marketing experts believe that it takes between 5-10 separate instances of exposure to your brand name and image before prospective customers feel comfortable making a purchase decision with your company. With this in mind, which of the following two scenarios will be most effective in terms of encouraging business growth?

Scenario #1: You write a company blog, but otherwise fail to engage in digital marketing efforts. Therefore, potential customers who find your website must wait for subsequent posts to be published before they’ve built up enough exposure to your brand to feel comfortable handing over their hard-earned dollars.

Versus…

Scenario #2: Not only do you publish regular articles on your company blog, you make an effort to seek out guest posting opportunities on reputable industry sites, engage with a wide follower base on social networking websites and take advantage of other opportunities to promote your brand online. As a result, prospective customers can rack up the requisite number of exposures within a single day’s browsing -- making them more likely to pull the trigger on engaging with your company right away.

Kind of a no-brainer, right?

When it comes to creating a memorable brand online in order to build customer relationships, it’s hard to argue with the value of being perceived as “being everywhere at once.” As consumers see your brand name mentioned in multiple places online, your presumed level of authority tends to increase, as does the comfort that potential customers have when it comes to spending money with your company.

And best of all, creating this type of expert image is something that anybody can do. You don’t need to be Coca Cola or General Electric to develop this type of brand recognition -- you just need to take the following steps:

Step #1: Commit to a regular guest posting schedule.

One of the fastest and easiest ways to increase the number of places in which your brand is mentioned is to put together a regular guest posting schedule.

The process of guest posting involves submitting articles to other industry blogs with the understanding that they’ll be published under your name and include a link back to your site in exchange for the free content offered. To find guest posting opportunities, reach out to any existing business connections you have or search Google for queries like “your industry + guest author.”

Step #2: Invest in social media marketing on a daily basis.

At the same time, step up your social media game by taking time out of every day to connect with followers on Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and any other social sites you participate on. Allowing your profiles to sit inactive for long periods of time gives the impression of someone who doesn’t care about his followers -- not the engaged, expert-level authority figure you’d like to be seen as.

A few of the activities that should make up your daily social media check-ins include:

Responding to any direct messages or @ replies you’ve received

Answering any relevant questions you encounter in your Twitter stream

Connecting with industry experts by re-tweeting their content or contacting them directly

Monitoring your profiles for any negative brand mentions that should be addressed

Loading up a social media manager service like Buffer with future status updates that will be posted to your profiles automatically at pre-determined times.

While “shooting the breeze” on social media sites might seem like a waste of your time, the relationships you build using these platforms can actually play a significant role in both your perceived level of authority and your business’s bottom line.

Step #3: Sign up for press connection services.

One final technique to use in order to boost your perceived level of authority involves press connection services like Help a Reporter Out, or “HARO,” which helps to facilitate introductions between the reporters who are seeking expert sources for their publications and the industry insiders that can provide them with quotes, statistics and more.

When you sign up for HARO, you’ll be entered into a database that’s sorted based on areas of expert knowledge. If a reporter searches this database for authority figures in the areas you’ve claimed to know about, you may be contacted in order to provide commentary for everything ranging from regional magazines to national nightly news shows.

Obviously, there are other ways to solicit media attention -- and to encourage the brand exposure and improve customer relationships that comes along with it -- including press release submission and direct story pitches. As a general rule, it’s much more important to simply have and invest in a single, defined brand for building excitement around your brand than to worry overly much about the specifics of your chosen PR approach.

As with any brand-building exercise, these activities will yield the best results if you apply them consistently over time -- and continue looking for new opportunities to engage with your customers and the press.